Bagels

Almost every Sunday I go to the bagel shop near our house and pick up bagels for our Sunday morning visit from the Sneed children and their families. My father used to be in charge of the bagels until he got too old to drive safely. For a while after that, Younger Son Sneed picked up his grandfather and they would stop and get the bagels on their way over here. My father died in August of 2005 and I became custodian of the bagels. Letting my father pick up the bagels was a dicey proposition because he lacked imagination when it came to bagel selection. The lovely Mrs. Sneed enjoys a good poppy seed bagel, so I told Dad to be sure to get some. He took that as an instruction to get all poppy seed bagels. After a year or two of him bringing a dozen poppy seed bagels every week, I finally told him that if I never saw another poppy seed again, it would still be too soon. My dad had the gift of annoyance and sometimes he had to be told directly that he was being annoying. So I stepped up and told him to knock it off with the poppy seeds. His reply was, "Well, you said you liked them." There was a certain level of dysfunction in our relationship. We had a don't ask/don't tell policy in a lot of areas. After that, Dad would go into the bagel place and tell the clerk to give him one dozen assorted. The staff of the bagel shop started prepacking his order in anticipation of his arrival on Sunday morning. This made my dad extremely pleased. He felt like he was a special customer in their eyes. What the kids in the shop were actually doing was foisting off whatever they had excess of or was too misshapened to sell to the eat-in customers, on my old dad. He would show up at our house with the most god-awful assortment of bagels you ever saw. The morning his bag contained about five salt bagels, I finally blew my stack. What kind of joint gives an eighty-year-old man five salt bagels in a dozen? Those five bagels had the recommended daily allowance of salt for an entire decade. First of all, it takes a special person to eat a salt bagel. There must be some Jewish cultural thing to it. The salt bagel must compliment something else. Former Christians cannot appreciate the salt bagel. But it wasn't just salt bagels, it was whatever they had excess of. There was no predicting what crap he would get handed. My father was too polite to complain about the garbage they we passing off on him. I wasn't. I went down to the shop with the intention of letting them have it. The owner happened to be in and I explained the situation to him. I have to say that he was understanding, and said he would instruct the staff not to pre-bag Dad's order anymore. I forget how we arranged for Dad to actually select what he wanted, but it worked out okay. When I went this morning, Mrs. Sneed told me to get pumpkin cream cheese. I love pumpkin anything and the pumpkin cream cheese was very good. It reminds me of the fall, my favorite time of the year. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky